Sig Christenson: Cool as a cucumber

The Iraqi sun is rising, our day beginning to get uncomfortably warm at 9:30 a.m. when the word comes down. Lance Cpl. Julio Gonzalez Jr. and his buddies have told their last story about lost nights on beaches from Cancun to Southern California to South Padre Island.

They’ve had about as much fun as they can for one day at his expense recounting his dubious exploits with the opposite and older sex in one of Oceanside’s less reputable watering holes.

The high Iraqi official we’ve been waiting for has at last arrived at the Marine base a few miles from the Ramadi government center.

Now it’s time to hit the Main Supply Route, or MSR.

“Let’s kick the tires and start the fires,” says the 23-year-old Gonzalez, a Brownsville resident given to cliches.

Everybody straps it up. Helmets and vests are on, Gonzalez is in the turret behind a really big machine gun with a long, nasty barrel and our driver, Cpl. Mark Wiegold, 22, of Chicago, has started the Humvee.

Its diesel engines rumble. A peculiar odor wafts through the air. It’s the dry, sour smell of Iraqi sand mixed with diesel exhaust and there are a lot of memories associated with it for me.

This was the primary odor of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the invasion. I can still see the line of trucks, tanks and armored personnel carriers crossing the tall, thick sand berm from Kuwait into Iraq at dawn on the morning of March 20, 2003.

The taste of this ground-churned vapor trail went all the way to Baghdad, where soldiers scraped body parts off the streets and the sickly sweet stink of rotting corpses followed us everywhere.

That was the smell of victory, but you missed it. It was all flag-waving glory on your TV at home, topped by the taking of Saddam International Airport by the battalion I was embedded with and the fall of the great dictator’s statue in Firdos’ Square.

Today it’s gut-check time for Gonzalez, Wiegold and Navy Corpsman Steve “Doc” Massey, 26, of Crisfield, Md. There are no embedded TV reporters with them out here and no live video feeds home.

A quick victory America cheered a little more than three years ago has gone out of fashion now that it’s a certifiable quagmire.

It isn’t fair, really, but all that’s left are three guys doing their duty in obscurity, in a war the Iraqis  not Americans  must win. These words about who will win this war aren’t mine, by the way, in case you’re thinking I’m one of those mainstream media people here who are aiding and abetting the enemy.

They are the words of generals and other officers I have interviewed since arriving here.

Somehow, Gonzalez and his crew have avoided being hit by insurgents over 200-plus road trips as a personal security detail for those generals. Surviving their tour will be glory enough.

The governor of Anbar Province, Maamoon Sami Rashid Al-Awani, steps out of a Marine headquarters building surrounding by a personal security detail. He wears an olive suit, plaid shirt and black shoes that are dull and a little worn.

A big man, he has the handshake of a bear and the life expectancy of a lab rat after 29 assassination attempts in 14 months.

The Humvees roll out toward the gate after we’re buttoned down. Awani and his U.S. adviser, Col. Frank Corte, are in the Hummer just ahead of us. A sign behind it warns, in green and red letters written both in Arabic and English, “Danger Stay Back.” Get too close and you’ll be shot.

Doc does a communication check. A Marine in the back seat to my left wears earplugs and green gloves. Everybody has blast-resistant glasses, in case we strike an IED, or improvised explosive device. Debris tends to rise up into the cabs in these blasts, striking the neck and back of the head, causing bleeding and severe brain trauma. But the eyes, too, are vulnerable, especially without the glasses.

Gonzalez swivels as we exit the base, and then turns in the opposite direction, looking for anyone on either side who might fire on us. He is our protector in that respect, but it’s also self-defense.

No one is more vulnerable on a convoy than the gunner.

We gain speed, flashing past a long line of Iraqis in sedans, light pickups and heavy vehicles waiting on a bridge to get into the base. Any one of those cars could be a bomb, its driver aware that we are coming.

The one thing as bad as this or worse is driving around Baghdad’s crowded streets and suddenly stuck at a packed intersection.

Bombings in the big city are a constant part of daily life, and they often occur in the morning and afternoon hours. The insurgents setting them off have a funny way of doing so right on the hour. I’ll write more about that soon.

I breathe a sigh of relief as we pass those cars, but a new threat quickly emerges. There are a lot more Iraqis, some in traditional white tunics, further down the road.

“Get!” Julio yells.

This is an ugly, well-rehearsed voice, not the soft natural one I heard earlier that tickles with irreverent laughter. There’s a lot of activity along this road and our gunner yells once more.

We pass a car packed with kids on our left, and I make out their faces. Most are smiling. You look at the faces of the adults, though, to get an idea of their demeanor. Someone who isn’t smiling or, worse yet, wearing a hard or crazed look is worth worrying about.

You want to think no human being would pack a car full of dynamite with kids, but you never know in this country.

“Get!”

Traffic thins out once we’re on the main highway out of town. A goatherd in a light orange tunic off the right side of the highway waves to us.

I raise one hand in return.

Silence reigns in the truck. I look out my window in search of anyone with a gun or rocket-propelled grenade over a shoulder. I am especially keen to see if anyone lurks in the dark windows of buildings in the distance, a perfect insurgent nest. The other guys in this truck are probably doing the same thing.

We’re moving at a high rate of speed, though, and that will make it difficult for someone to draw a bead on us. Like the armored Marine trucks ahead, we sometimes weave around patches in the road. Wiegold once takes us around a blackened section of the road.

The patches that look fresh often are the work of insurgents who have buried large artillery shells full of high explosives. They then watch and wait for Americans to drive over them, setting off the bomb with such things as a cell phone.

We are in western Iraq, roughly 60 miles from Baghdad. It’s an interesting mix of desert and lush farmland. This could be a stretch of West Texas south of Odessa, or a drive west from Del Rio to Big Bend. You wonder if the day may come when Texas farmers visit here to help improve Iraq’s antiquated planting practices.

Many of the farmers here still use hoes and spades.

Wiegold suddenly pulls left and we cross the median, into the westbound lane of the highway. Four Iraqi vehicles are to the left, one a large truck. Gonzalez spins the turret of his MK19 heavy machine gun to face them. He does the same thing when we pass two large orange dump trucks.

We aren’t quite winning hearts and minds by doing this. Indeed, Iraqis resent having to pull over to the side of the road when U.S. convoys pass. If you were occupied by a foreign power and had to live by such rules, there’s a damned good chance you, too, would be mad as hell about it.

You might even get mad enough to join the resistance.

There is no way to reconcile the risk-benefit equation. The precautions our troops are taking out here are designed to get them home in one piece, not win the war or convince Iraqis they should find it in their hearts to welcome us as friends – rather than resent us as occupiers.

The evasive maneuvers we take this day, and the transformation of Lance Cpl. Julio Gonzalez from a cuddly, good-natured friend of the older woman to badass Marine on the MSR is all part of Survival 101 in Iraq. We safely arrive at Camp Fallujah ready for a big meeting on security matters, and heaven only knows that our veteran Marines and rules of engagement made all the difference.

As the Marines stand outside their trucks clearing their weapons, Gonzalez leans back in the turret and takes stock.